The Queen's Fool Read online

  “Then sorry I am, to so disappoint you,” I said, as cold as Princess Elizabeth in one of her haughty moods.

  In a sudden movement she snatched my wrist, and twisted it round so that I was forced to turn and face her, her grip biting into the skin. “You’re not taking something?” she hissed. “You’ve not got some draught to take to stop a child coming? From your clever friends at court? Some slut’s trick?”

  “Of course not!” I said, roused to anger. “Why would I?”

  “God knows what you would or would not do!” she exclaimed in genuine distress, flinging me from her. “Why would you go to court? Why would you not come with us to Calais? Why be so unnatural, so unwomanly, more like a boy than a girl? Why come now, too late, when Daniel could have had his pick of any girl in Calais? Why come at all if you’re not going to breed?”

  I was stunned by her anger, it knocked the words out of me. For a moment I said nothing. Then slowly I found the words. “I was begged for a fool, it was not my choice,” I said. “You should reproach my father if you dare with that, not me. I wore boy’s clothes to protect me, as you well know. And I did not come with you because I had sworn to the Princess Elizabeth that I would be with her at her time of trial. Most women would think that showed a true heart, not a false one. And I came now because Daniel wanted me, and I wanted him. And I don’t believe a word you say. He could not have the pick of the girls of Calais.”

  “He could indeed!” she said, bridling. “Pretty girls and fertile girls too. Girls who would come with a dowry and not in breeches, a girl who has a baby in the cradle this summer and knows her place, and would be glad enough to be in my house, and proud to call me mother.”

  I felt very cold, like fear, like a dreadful uncertainty. “I thought you were talking in general,” I said. “D’you mean that there is a particular girl who likes Daniel?”

  Mrs. Carpenter would never tell the whole truth about anything. She turned away from me and went to the breakfast pot hanging beside the fireplace and took it off the hook as if she would go out with it and scour it again. “D’you call this clean?” she demanded crossly.

  “Daniel has a woman he likes, here in Calais?” I asked.

  “He never offered her marriage,” she said grudgingly. “He always said that you and he were betrothed and that he was promised.”

  “Is she Jew, or Gentile?” I whispered.

  “Gentile,” she said. “But she would take our religion if Daniel married her.”

  “Married her?” I exclaimed. “But you just said he always said he was betrothed to me!”

  She brought the pot to the kitchen table. “It was nothing,” she said, trying to slide away from her own indiscretion. “Only something she once said to me.”

  “You spoke to her about Daniel marrying her?”

  “I had to!” she flared up. “She came to the house when he was in Padua, her belly before her, wanting to know what would be done for her.”

  “Her belly?” I repeated numbly. “She is with child?”

  “She has his son,” Daniel’s mother said. “And a fine healthy boy, the very picture of him as a baby. Nobody could doubt whose child he is, not for a moment, even if she were not a lovely girl, a good girl, which she is.”

  I sank to the stool at the table and looked up at her in bewilderment. “Why did he not tell me?”

  She shrugged. “Why would he tell you? Did you tell him everything in all these long years when you made him wait for you?”

  I thought of Lord Robert’s dark eyes on me, and the touch of his mouth on my neck. “I did not lie with another and conceive a child,” I said quietly.

  “Daniel is a handsome young man,” she said. “Did you think he would wait like a nun for you? Or did you not think of him at all, while you played the fool and dressed like a whore and ran after who knows who?”

  I said nothing, listening to the resentment in her tone, observing the rage in her flushed cheeks and the spittle on her lips from her hissing speech.

  “Does he see his child?”

  “Every Sunday at church,” she said. I caught her quickly hidden smile of triumph. “And twice a week, when he tells you he is working late, he goes to her house to dine with her and to see his child.”

  I rose up from the table.

  “Where are you going?” she asked, suddenly alarmed.

  “I am going to meet him as he walks home,” I said. “I want to talk with him.”

  “Don’t upset him,” she said eagerly. “Don’t tell him that you know of this woman. It will do you no good if you quarrel. He married you, remember. You should be a good wife and wink at this other. Better women than you have turned away and seen nothing.”

  I thought of the look of blank pain on Queen Mary’s face when she heard Elizabeth’s lilting laugh at the king’s whisper in her ear.

  “Yes,” I said. “But I don’t care about being a good wife any longer. I don’t know what to think or what to care for.”

  I suddenly noticed the pot with the smear of gruel along the side and I snatched it up and threw it at the back door. It hit the wood with a resounding clang and bounced to the floor. “And you can scour your own damned pot!” I shouted at her shocked face. “And you can wait forever for a grandson from me.”

  I stormed from the house and across the marketplace, not seeing the stalls and the usual traders. I made my way across the fish quay, not even hearing the catcalls of the fishermen at my rapid pace and my uncovered head. I came to the door of the physician’s house in a rush and then realized that I could not hammer on it and demand to see Daniel. I would have to wait. I hitched myself up on to a low stone wall of the opposite house and settled down to wait for him. When passersby smiled or winked at me I glared at them, brazen, as if I were in my lad’s clothes again and had forgotten how to smooth down my skirts and cast down my eyes.

  I did not consider what I would say to him, nor did I plan what I might do. I just waited like a dog waits for his master. I just waited in pain, as a dog will do with its paw caught in a trap and there is nothing to do but to wait; not understanding what the pain is, not knowing what can be done. Just enduring. Just waiting.

  I heard the clock strike four and then half past before the side door opened and Daniel came out, calling a farewell and closing the door behind him. He had a flask of some green liquid in one hand, and when he came to the gate he started in the wrong direction, away from home. I was in a sudden terror that he was going to visit his lover, and that I, like some suspicious wife, would be caught spying on him. At once I crossed the road and ran up to him.

  “Daniel!”

  “Hannah!” His pleasure in seeing me was unfeigned. But after one glance at my white face he said: “Is there something wrong? Are you ill?”

  “No,” I said, my lip trembling. “I just wanted to see you.”

  “And now you do,” he said easily. He drew my hand through his arm. “I have to take this to Widow Jerrin’s house, will you come with me?”

  I nodded, and fell into step beside him. I could not keep up. The fullness of my petticoats under my gown prevented me from striding out as I had done when I was a pageboy. I lifted my skirts out to one side but they still hobbled me as if I was a mare, hog-tied in the horse-breaking ring. Daniel slowed down and we walked in silence. He stole a glance at me and guessed from my grim expression that all was not well, but he decided to deal first with the delivery of the medicine.

  The widow’s house was one of the older buildings inside the crisscrossing streets of the old town. The houses were packed in under the sheltering bulk of the castle, all the little alleyways overshadowed by the jutting first storeys of the houses that lined them, running north and south and intersected by the next road going east-west.

  “When we first came here, I thought I would never find my way round,” he said, making conversation. “And then I learned the names of the taverns. This has been an English town for two hundred years, remember. Every street corner has a ‘Bus